Week 9: Carbon, Carbon, and more Carbon

This week has been insanely busy, all the while quite monotonous. I flew back from Boston late Monday night, only to start back working the following morning. This week has been hectic although in a different type of way. The actual patient work and fabrication was extremely slow, that is until one of Dean’s associates brought us 10 castings from the Clinic in Mexico which needed to be laminated by next week! And so it began, we had to make and fully assemble 10 prosthetics (8 lower limb, 2 upper limb) within the next two weeks while keeping up with normal fabrication duties. These however are not your normal prosthetics, we must take every precaution and attempt to foresee any problem (then fix it) before they leave to Mexico again. There is very little room for error or adjustment as after Dean leaves the leg with them, he will no longer see them for a few months. Another difference to how things are normally run is that all of these sockets are created using carbon fiber which is usually only used for a final socket (after several plastic test versions). The Carbon fiber process itself takes a significantly longer time to make the prosthetic than the plastic preliminary prosthetic.

I previously went into some detail about the process so I will not go too deeply into what you must do to transform the carbon fiber filament into a hardened shell. I thought it may be interesting to see a step by step version of how the socket is created using carbon fiber. Below are a series of pictures depicting the steps involved.

I wanted to update everyone on the 3D scanner as well as the Foot Scanner. Firstly the good news! The foot scans have been very clear and the products created are of very high quality. Since we talked last we have had several foot orthotics come in and all of which have been a success. On a more disappointing note, the software required that allows use of the 3D scanner must be downloaded yet none of the office computers are able to run it. 

Until next week!